gears

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Session 5's recording failed to download correctly and is now gone forever, so before it leaves my brain permamently, I'm summarizing it here. The rest of the campaign is available in a YouTube playlist in the CaS Discord (i'm not posting a link publicly on the web, but feel free to ask one of the players for it).

The players head for Trausnitz Castle. Along the way, they're stopped by a young girl carrying a basket of flowers who seems enamoured with Onde. She hands her a flower crown, and then offers one to Signe and one to Caster as well; the three take them and put them on, and the girl seems pleased. Teacher, having recently read up on Landshut's culture and traditions, recognizes these as boxcar garlands, a Landshuter Hochzeit traditional flower crown!

At Trausnitz, they meet a rather flustered-seeming tour guide named Ute in a rather empty-seeming front office. Teacher picks up a few pamphlets, and the rest talk to Ute about the state of Trausnitz Castle. Ute reveals that while normally Trausnitz is full of old artifacts and artworks, almost everything has been moved into storage after a series of thefts early into the lockdown. One of the artifacts stolen is a reliquary of Saint Nantovinus, a minor Saint from the region. During their tour of the public areas of the empty Castle, the party wonders whether these relics were stolen as summoning catalysts, ritual components, or something else entirely. In the courtyard while the party talks to Ute, Teacher exploits Sacred Geometry found in the architecture of the castle to invoke the supervision of the Sephirot, the Tree of Life. Doing so reveals evidence of a battle in this courtyard some time during the Grail War, and that the ley line vein running underneath the Castle, like the rest of them throughout the town, seems to belong to Taigong Wang right now. In addition, there's a vague sense of something corrupted not too far away — perhaps Victor Frankenstein's Workshop? At the same time, Caster sends a gremlin familiar to explore the castle, directing it to seek the place of lowest elevation. The gremlin sneaks through the shaft of a servant's elevator and down a cesspit, then discovers a strange hallway far beneath the castle that's obviously magical in nature. Their tour concluded, the party regroups and plans to investigate the mysterious hall.

Caster and Teacher go into spirit form and descend to the space while the gremlin finds a path that their Masters can take, going backwards through an employees-only storage area and hallway and meeting them in one of the castle's public halls. Onde, however, decides to take the Servants' route, giving over to her Origin and turning into a wave… and rolls 1 Success on her check, resulting in her exiting wave-form in that cesspit the gremlin found. Despite being hundreds of years out of use, it still smells. Ahead of the group, Caster and Teacher learn a few important things about this space: first, the magical pressure it exerts on them is immense; second, it feels like a "simulacrum" of the Castle rather than the Castle itself; third, while there's a door back to the normal areas they came from, there doesn't seem to be a door to continue down the hallway, and it instead just ends; and fourth, it's haunted. A ghostly woman in a white gown with a faint smile appears for just a moment before vanishing with the sound of a small metal object clattering to the ground.

The rest of the Masters follow the path down to this strange space, and Onde extricates herself from the cesspit. Picking up the object that the ghost left behind, they find that it's a small silver coin, old and well worn; pressed on it is old German for "Celebrate the Epiphany" and a nondescript bust. Then, it's just the matter of the hallway. What kind of hallway doesn't have a door out of it? Not this one, apparently — Rosicruz's friendly demons see through the trick, revealing that there is in fact a door on the other end, but it's being hidden by magic. Once Rosicruz knows this, the door seems to reveal itself, and the party progresses to the second hallway. This one has a bend in it and even more doors, yet once more, no door on the far end. The ghostly woman appears again, dropping another coin where there ought to be a door, and vanishes. Working together, Caster and Rosicruz attempt to dowse for this hallway's exist, but get caught up in the trap; Signe watches them step forward, stop, and turn around, but they don't remember ever moving. Plans escalate; Onde, Rosicruz, and Teacher work together to create a wave-projection of Dave's oh-so-normal Common Sense as a means of rejecting the magic inherent to this place and declaring that there absolutely is a door where there should be a door, and sure enough, the door appears! The picture of this space's effects is becoming more clear: While the doors deeper in are always there, they're being removed from the memories of anyone in the space as soon as they stop perceiving them. That conclusion in mind, the party remembers where they are — the very Southeast corner of Landshut, getting closer to the edge of Lāmǐ Huánghouyou's Bounded Field with every step.

The next hallway is cross-shaped. Now more determined, the players head for where they bet the exit is, but are joined by an unwanted guest: a Servant Chimaera, different from the one they previously fought, apparently drawn to them by the soundwaves they used to pass through the last room and the magecraft they've used to get this far. Thus, the puzzle turns into a chase. Teacher came prepared, though, and attacks the Chimaera's conceptual essence by placing a "Life" tag used on traditional Hebrew golems on it and erasing a letter to make it instead say "Death." Its Spirit Origins momentarily destabilized, Signe follows up, delivering a thunderous flying kick and soaring off down the hallway, and Rosicruz leaves behind a salt barrier to slow it down further. Then they make a break for it, following the apparition's third coin to yet another hallway, this one full of different splitting paths in either direction. Here, Caster summons flying brooms for the party to fly towards the sound of the next falling coin on, while Onde throws waves in the opposite direction, and the Chimaera takes the bait.

The party tumbles into a small room on the left side of this final hallway while the Chimaera rages in the other direction. They're safe for the moment, it seems. Two things await them in this small room: the ghost woman standing with a smile, and a black-rubber-and-steel puppet body with long, crystalline hair inactive and discarded in the corner. Dave approaches the ghost and offers her the coins she left them —

And with a pulse of unknown magic from somewhere, that's when the Break Board inverts. The beautiful ghost suddenly grows old and vicious, a single altogether too long foot extending out from beneath her dress, she raises claws she didn't have a moment earlier, and swipes at the hapless nonmage without warning, attempting to disembowel him in one clean strike.

Teacher won't let that happen, though. He chants ——

כָּל הַמִּסְתַּכֵּל בְּאַרְבָּעָה דְּבָרים, ראוי לוֹ כְּאִלּוּ לֹא בָּא לָעוֹלָם:
מַה לְּמַעְלָה,
מַה לְּמַטָּה,
מַה לְּפָנִים,
וּמַה לְּאָחוֹר.
וְכָל שֶׁלֹּא חָס עַל כְּבוֹד קוֹנוֹ, רָאוּי לוֹ שֶׁלֹּא בָּא לָעוֹלָם

"All that looks into these four things, is better off not coming into the world:
What above,
What below,
What in front,
What before,
He who is not merciful to the dignity of his mind, is done justice by not coming into the world."

And as he does, Dave experiences something transcendent, an orchard in a space and time beyond his own, and a height of perspective he's never before known. Maimonides uses his Noble Phantasm, Critique of the Theology of Creation, to crystallize the "inversion" that the ghost underwent and turn it back at it, returning its own violence in kind via interpretation in Pshat, the literal sense, and finishing it off with his Rabbi laser eye beams (because obviously, all Rabbis have these, my Sunday school teachers did).

Dave, thankfully having retained all of his bowels, goes to investigate the anthropomorphic machine in the room. As an engineer, he can identify a lot of things about it, but his experience mostly serves to show him what he doesn't know. It doesn't have motors to power it, but there isn't a string or pulley system either; it must be powered by magecraft in usage. On its chest, he identifies what seems like a designation in Japanese: 「一万解箱四ご: 赤マント」 Ii-Mankaibako-Yongo: Aka Manto, or "Mankaibako the Fourth / One: Red Cloak." Opening the machine's chest, he discovers another machine that he doesn't understand, but knows enough to guess that it's a very old analog computer of some sort. Caster says they ought to destroy it; Rosicruz thinks about putting a daemon in it; but Dave is already thinking about returning it to its presumable owner, and as he thinks about it, picking up the puppet over his shoulder, the door into the room opens to reveal Shurijin Niwa — or, more accurately, 「万解箱一ご: 赤べこ」 Mankaibako-Ichigo: Akabeko, "Mankaibako the First: Red Cow," the puppet's finger-gun pointed at his head.

"Assertion: You have something that belongs to me. Suggestion: return it."

The robotic girl's threat is backed up by her Servant disappearing from spirit form behind her: Caster, a young boy wearing a crown of scrap and carrying a staff of junk: Chirizuka-Kaiō, Strange King of the Dust Heap. Dave diffuses tensions by handing over Aka Manto as a peace offering, much to Caster's chagrin, and Niwa returns the favor, issuing a warning to Teacher, who'd already discovered the memory-shielded door in this chamber: if he enters that door, he'll go directly into Huánghouyou's Bounded Field, and surely lose all of his memories. Hostilities thankfully avoided, Niwa suggests they leave this maze and have a talk, and that's where session ends.